


Thermodynamics

by FifteenHundredPaperDragons



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (just a little bit but thought I'd tag it anyhow), Canonical Character Death, Coming Out, Everyone's A Little In Love With Gansey, First Kiss, Fluff, Ghost Logistics, I Don't Understand The Pre-Canon Timeline And At This Point I'm Too Afraid To Ask, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Minor Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Not Canon Compliant, One Shot, Pre-Canon, Timeline What Timeline, billie joe armstrong - Freeform, canon-typical angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 13:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17561033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FifteenHundredPaperDragons/pseuds/FifteenHundredPaperDragons
Summary: Noah's dead, bored of long, lonely nights, and always cold; Ronan is sixteen and confused, but a bonfire of a boy.(alternate title: EDM and other bizarre mating rituals of teenage boys)





	Thermodynamics

**Author's Note:**

> set a little bit before the events of trc where they don't really know adam or blue yet (is that a point in the timeline or did adam come first idk)  
> 

Nights, for Noah, were bitterly cold. He was cold all the time, on account of his being dead, but nights were especially frigid. During the day, the sun warmed the air and all the buildings lining the streets of Henrietta. When the world was bright and awake, the blood pumping through everyone else's veins gave him a little vicarious warmth. Then the moon rose, bleaching every surface a cold, clinical white and drawing the warmth up out of the Earth, and it felt like it had always been an ice age but everyone had just forgotten. Nights were the worst. During the day he could be alive just as well as anyone else could, but at night, alone and cold, he got thinner. He always pictured himself getting thin like a sheet of cellophane, growing transparent and easy to stretch, like someone could pull him apart and tear through to the other side.

He'd taken to wandering at night. He didn't have much else to do. The whole idea of a haunting had seemed dumb when he wasn't the one doing the haunting, but now he understood where all those phantoms and poltergeists had been coming from. Nothing like a few empty-shelled nights to teach you the value of a good old classic haunting. It probably alleviated the boredom. Good cardio, too. Got the very stagnant blood pumping. 

Sometimes he wandered all of Henrietta. Usually he just wandered Monmouth, letting himself into locked rooms and rooting through things that didn't belong to him in hopes of finding something interesting. Every hour felt longer an hour was supposed to.

This was how Noah and Ronan properly encountered each other for the first time. One could, perhaps, call a formal introduction an encounter. One could call a conversation between three friends, one of whom is a talkative sort of middleman, an encounter. But these hadn't been real conversations; there were no glimpses of a person's soul to be had when exchanging names and pleasantries. They had yet to actually, properly meet. 

It was two a.m., a vulnerable hour which left no time for politeness and pretense. Noah was seeking a little warmth and shelter from the cold and Ronan was a raging bonfire of a boy who'd just about sworn off sleeping. It was only natural for things to happen as they did:  
1\. Noah Czerny was curious about the prickly Ronan Lynch.   
2\. Noah was a ghost who hadn't had to deal with mortal consequences in a little while, and so had developed a habit of letting himself into places to take a poke around.  
3\. Noah let himself into Ronan's bedroom at two a.m without bothering to knock.  
4\. A shoe left Ronan's hand like it had been thrown by a major league pitcher and sailed through the air with maximum prejudice. A mere few inches of empty space were the only thing that prevented it from hitting/going directly through Noah's head.  
5\. They both stared at each other in startled silence.

Noah stood in the doorway, unmoving, as though Ronan's gaze wouldn't catch him if he didn't move. Ronan sat on his bed and stared at the interloper, equally startled but channeling it into a withering expression. Logically, the loud 'bang' of the shoe striking the wall would have woken Gansey. They both stood frozen in their places, waiting for him to come stumbling down the hallway in his glasses with his hair askew but somehow still perfect. Gansey would come into the room expecting the worst and would instead be met with the would-be cat burglar and the master of self defense, armed with shoes and a corrosive attitude. They both dreaded that moment a little bit, as though Gansey was an overworked preschool teacher who would glance over the situation and send the both of them to time-out. They both awaited that moment desperately because Gansey had an odd knack for diffusing these sorts of situations. Well, either diffusing them or escalating them further than they ever needed to go: both ways would solve the moment's awkwardness. But it seemed Gansey had slept through the kerfuffle and was not coming to their rescue. They unfroze.

"What the fuck do you want?" asked Ronan. An electronic-sounding song that Noah didn't recognize was quietly seeping out of the stereo. 

"I don't know," said Noah. "Sorry, man."

"You don't exactly walk into someone's room at fucking whatever-o-clock and not have a reason for it."

"Well," Noah said, starting his explanation before he had enough thoughts gathered to finish it.   
"I, um. I could hear your music and I couldn't get to sleep. Could you turn it down?"

The volume was already at its lowest setting. Ronan gave Noah a different sort of suspicious look than he had just moments before. They both knew there was no way Noah could hear the music from his bedroom. Without breaking eye contact, Ronan leaned over and switched the stereo off.

"Thanks!" said Noah with all the brightness he could muster. The words fell out into a deafening silence. A pipe clanked somewhere. Noah imagined that he could hear his own heartbeat.

"Can I go to bed now?" asked Ronan, everything about his tone and his body language dismissive. There was something about his eyes, though. Something in his eyes was a little bit curious. Maybe he was trying to put together when, exactly, he and Noah had met, or when Noah had moved into Monmouth, or which classes they had together, or what his real reason was for being here. They both knew the stereo excuse was a lie.

"Yeah, sorry," said Noah, and left. 

The next evening, once they'd all retreated into their respective bedrooms and the hour was such that every reasonable being in Henrietta was asleep, Noah was surprised to find the sound of some sort of genre-edging EDM rumbling through the floorboards. It wasn't loud enough for Gansey to hear, or at least to notice from where he was sitting upstairs in his quiet concentration. But it was more than noticeable to Noah, who had been lying on his bed and pretending to play a legendary drum solo in midair. It seemed to be both a figurative middle finger and an invitation, a combination that might have been Ronan's speciality.

Noah didn't have much experience with threats, but he figured it'd be pretty hard for Ronan to carry through with anything. He got up and went over to Ronan's room, pausing at the door for a moment and working up the nerve to actually knock this time. The volume of the music went down a few notches, and Noah took that as an invitation to enter. 

"Can I help you?" asked Ronan, sharp and sarcastic, sounding like a retail worker one bad transaction away from doing something career-endingly impolite. 

"Yeah, actually, the music? It's, like, super loud again."

Ronan crossed his arms defiantly. "So?"

"Well, so nothing, I guess. Can't really sleep whether or not you're playing your bad EDM."

"Fuck off. I don't listen to _bad EDM_."

"I think you're trying to say that there is such a thing as, like, good EDM, and I'm gonna have to say that we definitely don't have the same taste in music."

"Fine. Whatever. I'll turn it down."

"No, that's okay. I mean, who needs sleep anyway?"

Ronan nodded, which seemed like a major concession. Noah took the opportunity.

"You don't seem like a hanging out kinda dude, but, uh, one obvious insomniac to another, it gets kinda boring with nobody to talk to," said Noah. Ronan raised an eyebrow. 

"I like the quiet."

"Well obviously that's a lie, or else I wouldn't be in here."

 _Touché,_ Ronan said with a quirk of his eyebrows. Noah sat down uninvited on the floor and started to absently twist the threads of the carpet. 

"We literally live in the same house, or, like, apartment-loft-warehouse-whatever-thing, and I feel like I don't know you at all."

Ronan nodded again.

"Like what you usually do with all this time when most people are fast asleep."

"Is that any of your fucking business?"

"I mean obviously it's on purpose, because who drinks that many energy drinks unless they're got a serious goal?"

Ronan grunted. As if to punctuate the statement, he knocked back the rest of something that had been living in a giant electric-green can on his bedside table.

"I just naturally don't sleep," said Noah, "but dude, I'd never stay up all night on purpose. You've gotta be doing something."

"Homework?" said Ronan. It sounded like a question. It was sort of a question: whether Noah knew that Ronan was still at Aglionby by the skin of his teeth and the virtue of his major inheritance, and had barely turned in a single piece of paper, much less done his homework, in about a year. Noah knew. He had spent time around Ronan, but more importantly, he'd spent time around Gansey and Ronan at the same time. The topic came up often.

"What homework?" Noah half-teased.  
Ronan pawed at the bedspread next to him, producing a crumpled sheet of paper. 

"Uh. Some of this shit-ton of homework for Bastardton Whelk?"

Noah's stomach swooped like a bird that hit an unexpected air current. "For who?" he asked. Surely he'd misheard. Still it felt like someone had turned on a vacuum and sucked all the air from the room. He was surprised Ronan hadn't noticed. 

"Barrington Whelk? The Latin Asshole himself?"

"Barrington Whelk?" Noah asked. It was sort of a distinctive name. To hear it said so casually, disdainfully even, threw him off balance. Last time he'd said it out loud it was adoring. Last time he'd said it in his head, it was hushed, a name little kids whispered to scare each other on the playground. "He's your... your Latin teacher?" 

Noah felt a little like he'd swallowed a handful of unexpected ice cubes. He pulled a handful of fibers out of the carpet. His other hand reached up to rest protectively on the back of his head. Latin teacher. That didn't seem right.

"Yes? The only Latin teacher at Aglionby? How the fuck don't you know him?"

"Oh. Well. I mean, I'm in Spanish. You know." Noah said, rubbing the side of his head self-conciously as he scrambled for a convincing lie. 

"Hmm," said Ronan, unconvinced. He'd never have expected that he'd have to convince a fellow Aglionby student that he, Noah Czerny, knew Barrington Whelk.

"No, I know him, though. He's, uh. His hair? It's sort of--" he made a vague gesture-- "and, uh. I know him."

"And that face you're making says that you agree he's a greasy son of a bitch, right?" Ronan asked conversationally as he examined his cuticles. 

Noah's eyes went wide. That was unexpected, although if anyone was going to say something like that about an Aglionby teacher, it was Ronan. The air rushed back into the room. Noah covered his mouth, snorting gleefully. "A greasy son of a bitch!"

Ronan grinned a shark-like grin. "Thank you! Gansey's always on about how we should respect him a little or some shit. But the man is a pretentious, desperate asshole."

Noah nodded in joyous agreement. Ronan forged onward, fed by Noah's approval and seeing somehow the dark undercurrent in Noah's smile. They shared a kindred energy for a moment, laughing and toying a little bit with the spirit of revenge. 

"Got a Whelk-related story, actually. Buckle the fuck up."

"What kind of story?" Noah asked cautiously. "Like, about his. Um, his time back at Aglionby?"

"Nah, nothing like that. Bet he was boring as fuck back then. This was a few weeks ago. Remember those old-ass eggs Gansey left in the fridge for like, three months?"

"Yeah?" 

"Whelk? He left his car window rolled down. Took my opportunity, dropped a couple on the driver's seat. They smelled so bad, too." At this, Noah burst into laugher. He could picture the scene. "You should have seen his face when he sat down. Absolutely priceless."

"Oh my GOD, dude!" Noah managed to choke out. He was practically hysterical at the thought. Ronan looked pretty pleased with himself. 

It took just a single moment of sharing a vaguely mean-spirited laugh to forge a little spark between them. From then on, they were friends.

-

Gansey would go blissfully to sleep (or whatever oblivious thing he did when his brain wouldn't slow down enough for him to sleep). Then Ronan would play his music, which in Noah's professional opinion sounded like robots whining, and Noah would find his way to Ronan's room. There he'd sit on the floor and Ronan would lay on the bed and they'd talk in sentence fragments and Ronan would supply petulant silences while Noah offered long and pointless tangents. Mostly Noah did the talking. One night he made them listen to Blink-182 instead, and when Ronan complained he switched to a playlist entitled "best of 2006 pop-punk hits" and told Ronan that he'd better shut his mouth.   
Noah talked a lot and never really said anything, and whenever Ronan was convinced to talk he ended up saying a lot. A lot more than he meant to, every time without fail.

Sometimes he talked about his brother Declan, whom Noah learned wore suits and always had a girlfriend that Ronan despised and always did something that made Ronan want to punch him. Sometimes Noah caught snippets of sentiments about Gansey, which were always phrased just so and which always made him give Ronan a side-eyed look. He heard tell of the new boy in all of Ronan's classes, who was sandy and blisteringly smart and respected the teachers but was sort of sharp at the edges like Ronan. He heard a lot of tell about him, actually, which also merited the side-eyed look that Ronan always ignored. One time Ronan brought up his father, but then stopped mid-sentence and picked up a new thread going a different direction. 

They'd laughed about exceptionally stupid things, then exchanged little glances if these things came up during their Day Lives. They gave each other a hard time about everything that didn't matter-- Noah would tease endlessly and Ronan would just go right for the throat. 

The nights stopped being so cold. Noah felt like he knew again, and was known, at least a little; like he'd finally managed to make another friend.

It was drawing into October and Monmouth was getting colder. In true Virginia fashion, a cold snap hit suddenly one night; they all awoke to find snow on the ground and spent the day mourning the sudden death of the summer weather. Noah didn't like it when it snowed, when everything was bright but dead and cold at the same time. He'd loved the snow when he was younger, but now it felt like an extra layer between him and the world. When school ended they took the Pig on a desperate trek to buy a couple space heaters. She nearly died of hypothermia several times, coughing and shuddering on the side of the road while Gansey muttered something about antifreeze in between fake curses and Ronan supplemented him with real ones.

Despite the space heaters, it was colder than usual that night. Noah felt it in his bones, felt the ice shuddering up close to his spine, and kept looking down to find that his hands had gone translucent while his mind was elsewhere. Ronan didn't turn on the stereo that night, although it probably wouldn't have been heard over the space heater (which, anyhow, had stolen the stereo's electrical outlet). Noah went over to Ronan's room anyway, and Ronan let him in, and because he was especially cold he went and sat on the foot of the bed. He needed to be close to pumping blood and electrical impulses. He was scared that, in this quiet cold, he might go transparent altogether. 

Ronan looked sort of uncomfortable with the new seating arrangement. He did a good job hiding it, but his discomfort was evident to Noah in his smoothing of the sheets and his constant shifting of his sitting position.

"Hey!" said Noah, falsely bright.

"It's cold as balls in here," said Ronan. This was surface chatter: small talk about the weather. He wanted Ronan to get angry, to get sad, to laugh hysterically; he wanted the room to catch fire with some stupid, emotional reminder of what it had been like to burn. It was too cold outside. Noah wanted to feel human, instead of just bones buried under a layer of snow. 

"Sometimes," Noah said, "I'm not sure why I'm still here. Like, I don't need to be here anymore."

"Here?"

"Henrietta," said Noah, but really he meant Earth. He meant wherever it was that you were before you died. 

"Oh. Me too. Virginia's kind of a shithole sometimes."

"But I'm scared of what would happen if I left."

Ronan was silent. Noah wanted to know what Ronan was scared of. He asked. 

Ronan said, "I don't know. I don't fucking know. I don't know what I'm doing."

"Sometimes I feel like I'm lying to everyone, just be being here. Like, like just by being me and staying here that I'm lying to you guys. But you're... you're my friends. I don't wanna do that. To lie, I mean. But I sort of do at the same time. Like it's a lot less work to lie, somehow," Noah said, now picking at the blanket with one solid-looking hand. The moonlight shone right through his other hand, the one that he left tucked inside the pocket of his sweatshirt. 

Ronan laughed. Noah looked up in surprise, only to find that Ronan's face looked anything but amused, that his shark's features looked softer and sadder and more human in the moonlight. 

"Me too," said Ronan. "Shit, man." He had also been lying, but he wasn't clear on the truth yet. Like opening the refrigerator to find an off-kilter smell inside, but not yet knowing where it's coming from or if you'll still be able to stomach whatever it is. 

He had seen the girls glancing furtively over at him whenever he was out and about in Henrietta. He saw them in their groups, saw them glance over at him and quickly glance away, giggling and blushing and avoiding eye contact. Whenever he was out with Gansey, someone would come up and greet Gansey with a little too much flattery to just be politeness and Gansey would smile a brilliant smile and manage to tactfully deflect them. Sometimes they'd get into a little more small talk and they'd exchange numbers as Ronan stared on, arms crossed, feeling sullen and a little like he wanted to burst out of his own skin as if it were a chrysalis. Sometimes they'd come up to Gansey in a pack and the bravest one would smile at Ronan and say some sugary thing, and he knew that he was supposed to feel it in his gut and get a little pink and talk a little more quickly like Gansey sometimes did.

He'd expected for years that the feeling would come on someday like it did for the rest of his friends; like one week they'd be discussing video game stats and the next week they'd be staring a little too long at the glossy cheerleaders across the street. Instead, Gansey would smile back at a soft-haired, red-lipped girl, and Ronan would feel like his own skin was drawing ever-tighter over top of him and suffocating him to death.

And so he looked at Noah and decided to talk again. "Sometimes," Ronan said, "I don't know whether to believe myself or not. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Noah nodded. He felt the same whenever he went outside with Ronan or Gansey to do some stupid thing he'd never gotten the chance to do and let himself forget that this didn't really count.

Ronan's breath was condensing in the air before him. "I- we know each other pretty well. Or I know fuck-all about you and you know all the secrets of my shitty life because for some reason I see your face and suddenly I'm spilling my life story. Example: right now."

"People say I have an approachable face."

"Fuck off. They do not. No real person has ever said that."

"They do too! A bunch of my classmates said that."

"Who?"

Suddenly Noah wasn't sure if he should keep up the charade or not. He'd like to be alive a little bit longer. And he wanted to stop lying.

"Just people." The scales tip. Being alive is more of a priority. 

"'Just people' my ass. Nobody has said you have an 'approachable face.' Unless they were hitting on you, and doing a piss-poor job of it too."

"Well. Yeah, that basically sounds like the caliber of the average Aglionby boy's, like, flirting game. 'Hey, look, my mom bought a 5 mil car, or... something equally cool. Want a bad pick up line?' And then they go and try to, like, french in the shrubs next to the chemistry labs."

"Sounds about right. No wonder all the underclassmen are single."

"I mean, I don't know," said Noah, "I'd be lying if I said it hasn't worked on me before." 

Ronan gave him a Look. It wasn't a judging look or a laughing look or even a questioning look. It was more of a re-evaluating look, Noah thought, like he could see disjointed puzzle pieces rearranging themselves on the other side of Ronan's pupils.

Noah decided he wanted to sit closer to Ronan because he was cold. Ronan hadn't made his bed properly that morning and the comforter shifted underneath him as he scooted closer. His hand touched Ronan's, quite by accident, and they both startled and drew away. Ronan gave Noah another Look, and Noah returned it this time. Ronan cleared his throat, then cleared it a second time when the first was unsatisfactory.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked, all pretense of a hard shell gone. "I mean. Just to... see. Shit, sorry, what am I-"

But Noah had been there, stuck in that excruciatingly hesitant moment/second/lifetime, and he'd never want to go back (which was true, for once). So he cupped Ronan's rosy and sullen face in his cold, cold hands and planted a kiss upon his lips. 

It was an awkward kiss. The angle was weird, the situation was weird, and both of them just sort of sat there. It had been a long time since Noah had kissed anybody, and he didn't think Ronan had done this before at all. After a moment, he leaned back, separating them. 

"Is that... it?"

Noah wasn't sure where to start with that, but "no" was a good a place as any. "No, that's not it. That's, uh, that wasn't a good kiss. A good kiss is like the ones in the movies. Like- like time sort of slows down and speeds up at the same time."

"Oh," said Ronan, crossing his arms. 

"I don't really know how to do one of those. It kind of just happens. I mean, we could try again, I guess."

"Okay," said Ronan, uncrossing his arms and then crossing them back the other way. 

"Do you... want to? If you don't, we don't have to. I can just go whenever and that's, like, totally fine," said Noah, and his words came out even more quickly than usual; he spoke so fast it sounded like the words were stumbling on each other's heels.

"No, yeah. I want to. I think. Fuck, I have no idea. I just... fuck it, I don't know!" Ronan said, because that was the sort of thing Ronan said when he was nervous or sad or upset or happy or excited or pissed or any sampling of all of the above. 

"Well, maybe not that far," said Noah, smiling crookedly. Ronan blinked and then his cold-bitten rosy cheeks got mottled and redder.

"Keep telling yourself that's what I meant, shithead," he said, because he couldn't ever quite give up his spiny exterior. The thorns came back full force when he was embarrassed, but Noah knew him well enough by now to avoid being hurt by them. 

"Ooh, sassy," said Noah, grinning, "but, like, you won't--" 

He was interrupted by Ronan leaning over to kiss him. Determined to make the experience a little bit less like someone pressing the plastic faces of two Barbie dolls together at awkward angles and a little bit more like the one or two kisses he'd had in life that made his heartbeat escape out of every part of his body, Noah leaned forward, opening his mouth slightly and moving his hand up from where it was splayed on the bed to settle in the crook of Ronan's shoulder. Apparently, that was the right thing to do; it had an effect much like drawing open a blackout blind and letting in a burst of mid-afternoon light. Ronan, as it turned out, had excellent instincts of what to do with tongues and teeth once he leaned into it properly. Noah did his best to keep up, tilting his head so their noses stopped pressing uncomfortably into each others'. Ronan broke away a centimeter's distance to catch a breath; Noah shifted closer. He bumped his folded knees into the top of Ronan's legs, though he might as well have brushed against a high-voltage power line: they both jumped in surprise. Then they were back into the kiss, knees overlapping as their lips did, an awkward jumbled-up mess of hands looking for a safe place to rest, a spot that was warm enough but not too risqué. 

It was a buzzing sort of kiss-- not a heart-pounding, hands-in-hair type of kiss, but the sort that made the blood in one's veins warm and bubble and buzz. A kiss that might, in different circumstances, have been on its way to that other type of kiss. That might be more electric if they'd known each other a little longer, or for barely any time at all; if they'd met on a dizzying, crowded dance floor or through a shy glance in the hallways of Aglionby; if they were desperate for different reasons than the kinds they felt tonight; if either of them had that magnetic pull in the gut, like gravity working sideways. _If, if, if._

They broke apart and made heavy-lidded waking-up eye contact, and then Noah flung himself backwards onto the bed because all of his blood that wasn't really there was still fizzing and boiling like he was alive and running a marathon. He lay there spread-eagled and laughed in a breathy sort of way; he felt warm, for once, even as the cold glow of the moon sewed patchwork across the floorboards. Ronan sat there, leaning back on his hands and looking at Noah contemplatively. He still seemed a little dazed.

"Don't ask 'is that it' again because I don't think I have anything better to offer," said Noah. 

"No. I mean yeah. I mean, shit, okay, Czerny, I think you've done enough." Ronan said, and looked at the ceiling.

He felt, retroactively, all the bubbles and butterflies of fledgling crushes as he tried to swing across the monkey bars as easily as the boy with floppy golden hair, or missed shot after shot for no discernible reason every time he played against the boy with the eyes that were so green it seemed like nature couldn't quite compete, or was quite unable to stand the sight of his best friend chewing on a mint leaf and going pink in the face at the flattery of a clever girl.

"You okay, dude?" asked Noah, about seventy-five percent teasing. Ronan did suppose he was staring empty-eyed at the ceiling as all of his uncomfortable puzzle pieces started to shift into a coherent shape. 

"I- yeah," said Ronan, and crossed his arms protectively over his chest again. "I'm just-- never mind."

"All right," said Noah, unsure. Talking to Ronan at the moment felt about as tense as running barefoot across a minefield. "I'll just go," he said, pointing a thumb at the door. "Yep, I'll be going. Good night, man. See you around. Thanks. Well, no, not thanks, that was a super weird thing to say, sorry. But it's, uh, like, it's nice to be your friend. Sorry if I was kind of cold. Like, in a physical sense. Um, going now."

"Wait," said Ronan, and Noah paused in his leaving, half in and half out of the room. "I'm going to ask a question that'll make me look like a dumbass--"

"I'm not gay," said Noah, and it came out as fast and defensive-sounding as a fight or flight instinct. Things had changed a lot in a decade. "I mean," he quickly amended, "if that's what you were about to ask."

"Well-"

"That's fine. And that came out wrong," Noah went on, coming back into the room and quietly closing the door. "Obviously I'm, like, a little bit... yeah. I'm, you know, bi. Like Billie Joe Armstrong."

"Oh. Okay," Ronan said, and then his wholly unsettling 'lost-in-the-woods' expression sharpened again into a more characteristic razor-blade smile. "Also, who?"

"Dude! Oh my god, man, you are NOT allowed to wear that much black on a daily basis and... and have that haircut and that, like, all-around attitude and NOT know who BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG is. Man! I just kissed you and you don't know Billie Joe! I can't believe this! I've, like, broken my own moral code!"

The sharp smile had not left Ronan's face. It seemed like it was sharp because it was thin, like broken glass. "Nah, of course I fucking know who he is." Noah let himself relax again, heaving out a breath of anxious air. He went to leave the room again. "He's the My Chemical Romance guy, right?"

Noah shut the door with a snap, muffling Ronan's laughs. 

"Sings 'London Calling,' yeah?" Ronan shouted.

Noah shouted back through the door. "Dude! I hate you!"

He didn't. He still felt warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah it's massively self-indulgent and i'm glad it didn't happen in canon bc it totally would take away from the emotional gravitas of the Pynch First Kiss. but it sure was fun to write and i felt obligated to post it because a. unspoken rule if you write anything for a rarepair you've gotta post it and b. i really just want to get back into writing fic post-nanowrimo. also i will never get over “ronan accidentally implies sex because he swears so much and then is embarrassed bc he’s a nerd” you can pry this trope that i made up from my cold dead hands  
> smash that mf like if noah's storyline makes you sad as heck bc me too

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah it's massively self-indulgent and i'm glad it didn't happen in canon bc it totally would take away from the emotional gravitas of the Pynch First Kiss. but it sure was fun to write and i felt obligated to post it because a. unspoken rule if you write anything for a rarepair you've gotta post it and b. i really just want to get back into writing fic post-nanowrimo. also i will never get over “ronan accidentally implies sex because he swears so much and then is embarrassed bc he’s a nerd” you can pry this trope that i made up from my cold dead hands !
> 
> smash that mf like if noah's storyline makes you sad as heck bc me too


End file.
